A broad range of market factors, from historic-level weather events to increasing consumer expectations, are leading regulators and customers to demand improved service from their utilities. This heightened expectation requires utilities to make changes across business processes, from supporting consumers with new and mobile customer experience to improving field response during outages and other unplanned events. To meet this need, Oracle Utilities introduced Oracle Utilities Operations Mobile Application, a mobile device application that field workers can access on demand and use to address cost, speed, and information accuracy challenges of grid and outage-related field work...

The Oracle Data Cloud launched 'Validated Demographics,' age and gender targeting across an audience of over 200MM unique IDs with up to twice the precision of age and gender benchmarks, per the industry-wide campaign norms tracked by Nielsen's Digital Ad Ratings and comScore's Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE).

Den Howlett writes in diginomica, "Last year, I was critical of Oracle's muddled messaging. This year, the general tenor of presentation has been a LOT crisper. Competitors? Watch out. Oracle's got its act together in many places.

Larry Ellison's keynotes are always a highlight and this year he did not disappoint. Amusing, cajoling, impish - this was the Larry of old that we've come to admire as the performer par excellence of Silicon Valley. Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce might be the Silicon Valley pied piper, but it is Ellison who owns the ground on which his successors play..."

"My first experience of Oracle's OpenWorld conference was an eye-opener. Here's a wrap up from the event...

Oracle is kind of like the vendor that people love to hate. Its founder and CTO, Larry Ellison, is something of a divisive figure: one of the richest people in the world who owns an island and spends his time sponsoring big yacht races.

Jim writes, "Oracle Modern Best Practice is one year old. We launched this online cache of resources because, when considering technology to solve business challenges, our customers and future customers want to painlessly do their own initial research. And, once engaged with solution providers, Oracle Modern Best Practice provides a strategic and tactical framework for planning activities.

After reaching this milestone, I asked Steve Cox, VP of Oracle Cloud go-to-market and Oracle Modern Best Practice champion, for his perspective on the results so far and what to expect in the future..."

"Go to any security conference and you'll likely hear someone say cybersecurity is a 'big data problem' or claim artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are the best hope we have to improve our defenses. Most organizations collect mountains of data and urgently need help sifting through it all to find signs of an attack or breach. First generation tools like SIEM (security information and event management) systems, gave security teams a way to correlate events and triage the data. Then solutions with powerful search and indexing capabilities emerged, enabling security teams to quickly search through massive amounts of indexed data..."

"Toyota announced that it is investing US $1 billion over the next five years to establish a new R&D arm headquartered in Silicon Valley and focused on artificial intelligence and robotics. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) plans to hire hundreds of engineers to staff a main facility in Palo Alto, Calif., near Stanford University, and a second facility located near MIT in Cambridge, Mass..."

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next frontier in technology as humans are working to tap into the enormous data-processing capability of computers. AI is here to stay as major tech firms spends billions of dollars on the space. Here are four industries that would see massive changes as the applications of artificial intelligence advances across different areas of human endeavor...."

"I like to think about advances in AI through lens of the history of flight," Eric Horvitz, director of the Microsoft Research lab told a crowded room at EmTech, MIT's annual technology conference in Cambridge, MA. "It started as a few guys on a windy beach looking at a kite," said Horvitz. "And 50 years later, we have a 707."

"Facebook is working on artificial intelligence (AI) feature that can understand what's going on in your photos, which in turn would help your Newsfeed perform better. This feature will allow it to answer questions about a photo, a feature aimed at helping blind people 'see' images uploaded to the social network.

Speaking at Web Summit, Facebook's CTO, Mike Schroepfer, detailed a new system the company has been developing to understand what's happening in photos and translate that into natural language elements..."

Jeff writes, "Last week's Oracle OpenWorld had important announcements on our product families, including our new SPARC M7 and T7 servers, accompanied by the release of Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.3 and Oracle Solaris 11.3 that fully exploit the new hardware's capabilities. This demonstrates the results of our research and development investment to deliver increasingly powerful and efficient systems.

In addition to the above links, here are new and updated blogs and white papers that describe the new product features and performance:.."

The new Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5-8 is the latest in the X5 family of engineered systems. Oracle Exadata integrates hardware and software to deliver the highest performance database deployments at the lowest cost. Each Oracle Exadata X5-8 system offers up to 576 CPU cores, more than 1.3 petabytes of disk storage or 180 terabytes of ultra fast PCIe flash, and up to 24 terabytes of memory.

Oracle Exadata X5-8 is ideal for in-memory databases, large data warehouses, or demanding OLTP workloads. The high compute, storage and memory capacity of the Oracle Exadata X5-8 is designed for large-scale private cloud database initiatives, enabling large numbers of databases with varied workloads to be consolidated onto a single Exadata system, resulting in greatly reduced operational and management costs...

Ritu Agrawal writes, "In earlier releases of Oracle Solaris Cluster, you were able to configure a data service (sometimes also referred to as an agent) for Oracle VM Server for SPARC only manually using a command line interface. This was tedious, requiring the administrator to run commands on multiple nodes.

With Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.3 comes a new graphical wizard that simplifies the configuration considerably. The wizard, using a few clicks, makes a guest domain, as a black box entity, highly available..."

John writes, "We just released a maintenance update for Oracle VM 3.2 to deliver new hardware support, improve stability, and provide bug fixes. You can review the Oracle VM What's New Wiki for 3.2.10 Manager and 3.2.10 Server for the list of What's New and Notable Bug Fixes..."

"Last week, during SFD8, I got to meet with two incredibly interesting storage startups: Cohesity and Coho Data.

They do different jobs, since they target two different markets (primary
and secondary storage) but both have developed one of the most compelling
features you can find today on the market - And I'm sure they'll be
followed by others..."

Any data storage industry executive or analyst worth his or her filesystem knows that as soon as NAND flash became enterprise-ready-for-prime time in the 2006-2009 time frame, the industry was permanently upended.

One could argue that ever since NAND flash evolved to become the enterprise storage technology that dreams are made of, the storage industry as a whole has been in consolidation mode.

"An all-flash data center can respond instantly to user requests for information, and it requires less power and less physical floor space. The problem is moving to an all-flash storage infrastructure is expensive. However, it can be an affordable reality if the data center were only responsible for its active data. In reality, most of an organization's data is not active and should not be on flash.

Of course deleting the non-flash data set is not an option. This data has to be stored, managed and maintained, immediately eliminating those reductions in power and floor space requirements. Moving non-flash data to the cloud brings those reductions back into play, but it also introduces its challenges..."

"On the surface, the future of hard disk drives (HDDs) seems secure. They account for the bulk of all storage capacity shipped and have had a strong growth curve for years. It's a $32 billion-per-year industry, and HDDs are found in just about every office and home.

But that rosy picture hides some underlying problems. At the high end, 15k SAS and Fibre Channel disk is being squeezed out of the picture by much faster flash for systems that require near-instant response..."

Cisco forecasts that global Internet traffic in 2019 will be equivalent to 66 times the volume of the entire global Internet in 2005. Worldwide, Internet traffic will reach 37 gigabytes (GB) per capita by 2019, up from 15.5 GB per capita in 2014. That's more than a doubling of traffic in just five years.

All of this traffic is carrying more data than the world has ever seen before - approximately 2.5 exabytes of data every day, in fact. Where there is data, there is the need for storage, which creates a quandary for enterprises. How can they scale to meet this need, and how can they do it without breaking the bank?

"Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe, is a game-changing storage standard for PCIe-connected drives. It is replacing AHCI and along with the U.2 (SFF-8639) connector it is replacing both SAS and SATA for high speed, low latency storage. It's the smart way to connect up flash and post-flash storage tech to your servers.

The numbers and the theory seem sound, but what is it like in the real world?..."

"Ten times more power than lithium ion -- but still ten years off: A fluffy carbon electrode has brought scientists at Cambridge University a step closer to producing a workable lithium-air battery, but many technical challenges remain.

Today's lithium-ion batteries are light, but bulky for the charge they store. Other battery chemistries have a better energy density. For years, scientists have been looking for ways to make batteries with all the advantages of Li-ion, but that take up less space..."

"Scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have made the first direct images showing that electrical currents can flow along the boundaries between tiny magnetic regions of a material that normally doesn't conduct electricity. The results could have major implications for magnetic memory storage..."

"I recently read a local newspaper's survey in which drivers were asked about the ethics of self-driving cars. Most respondents believed that autodriving cars would behave badly if placed in a dilemma. The most common dilemma is this: the self-driving car is approaching a school bus that has had an accident. The schoolchildren have gotten off the bus, and the self-driving car is going too fast. It will either hit the empty bus, killing its passenger, or swerve into the group of children, possibly killing them. Most people believe the car would kill its passenger, but without any foundation for that in fact..."

The answer, according to senior vice president Chester Ritchie, depends on how you frame the question. Today, the £3.6bn payment processor isn't doing anything internally with digital currency or the blockchain, he says, but like many payment services companies, it is interfacing with the industry in an effort to best serve merchant clients..."

"About halfway through the conversation at Money20/20, discussion turns to Kodak.

It's not without merit. The photography giant once boasted more than 145,000 employees and $16bn in global revenues, but its empire all but crumbled due to rise of digital photography. To digital currency proponents, this shift has been held up as an example of what happens when incumbents fail to innovate when new technologies lead to the creation of new behaviors..."

"This is a guest post by Senthil Radhakrishnan, the Vice President and Head of Capital Market Solutions Group at Virtusa. Senthil has 16+ years' experience focused in capital markets technology with top tier Investment banks such as UBS, JPMC, Barclays, and others..."

"As obvious an oversight as it could be, attempting to type the bitcoin symbol via text, email, or on webpages is not the easiest thing. However, after a successful vote at the latest Unicode meeting, users will be able to easily type the character..."

"The first Waffle House opened its doors in 1955, five years after Diner's Club issued the world's first multiple merchant credit card. It was only in 2006 - 61 years later - that Waffle House began accepting credit cards as payment. But the upgrade to Waffle House's point-of-sale hardware allowing them to take credit cards opens the company up to even more payment options. With the chain's national rollout of the NCR Silver POS, one of those potential options is bitcoin..."

"Bitcoin will be the sixth largest global reserve currency by 2030, according to research by Silicon Valley investment firm Magister Advisors, which surveyed some 30 block chain companies, the International Business Times reported. The research also indicates banks will invest $1 billion in block chain technology in the next few years and that the block chain will become the rails on which finance runs..."

"Mention the year of the Linux desktop, and you are guaranteed to get a laugh. The six words have become a catchphrase, with the implication that it will never happen. But, even more importantly, the laughter indicates a change in attitude.

Where once Linux advocates were out to change the world, for many today, using free software has become no more than a convenience, or at most a matter of identity..."

"The numbers don't lie, OpenStack is the most active open-source cloud project and perhaps the most active open-source effort of all time. In a session at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Jesus Gonzalez-Barhona, co-founder of Bitergia, detailed the quantitative state of the Open Cloud.

Bitergia has been providing and analyzing data analysis reports to the OpenStack Foundation's Activity dashboard for several years..."

"There's no doubt DevOps is picking up steam, but just how quickly depends on who you are talking to. One survey projection indicates 55 percent have already adopted DevOps practices and an additional 31 percent plan to do so. A more measured Gartner take says it will be a mainstream strategy for 25 percent of the Global 2000 by 2016..."

"DevOps may have been around for a while now, but adoption is finally heading towards the mainstream. According to a recent Gartner study, DevOps will be deployed by around 25 percent of Global 2000 companies by next year..."

"This next BriefingsDirect DevOps thought leadership discussion explores the impact of improved development on security and how those investing in DevOps models specifically can expect to improve their security, compliance, and risk-mitigation outcomes.

To help better understand the relationship between DevOps and security, we're joined by two panelists..."

Andy writes, "MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0.25 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. This is a maintenance release that includes a few enhancements and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in
the change log.

Alexa writes, "Every year, there are at least 5 days I wish I lived in the United States. This year, those days would've been between October 23rd and October 29th for Oracle Open World 2015. For those who are not familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is an annual convention for business decision-makers, IT management, and line-of-business end users and it has always been about building a community of Oracle users.

The event has grown so much over the years, now totaling 25 specialized conferences under one Oracle OpenWorld umbrella. More than 60.000 attendees from 140 countries descended upon San Francisco to attend conferences like HCM Central for HR practitioners, Marketing Central for modern marketing experts, Sales Central for sales team, Service Cloud and Supply Chains and 18 conferences for vertical industries..."

Jim writes, "Oracle recently released the results of the Oracle Cloud Agility study, a survey of 2,263 employees working for large global enterprises. 64% of respondents consider their organization to be agile and 81% stated that the ability to rapidly develop, test, and launch new business applications is either critically important or important to the success of their business. Yet only 32% state that they fully understand what Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is, while 29% admit that they 'do not understand it at all'.

Oracle is seeing widespread adoption of PaaS by companies of all sizes, specifically to increase business agility. With apparently widespread lack of understanding of PaaS among large organizations, I thought it made sense to put a midsize lens on the subject.

To that end, I had a conversation with Dain Hansen, Director of Product Marketing in Oracle's Technology Business Group..."

Chris writes, "Last week, Larry Ellison introduced userspace patching with Oracle Ksplice. This is a groundbreaking addition to the already extensive capabilities of Ksplice, giving administrators the tools they need to cope with security threats and other issues without impacting running systems.

If you're unfamiliar with Ksplice, it provides zero-downtime patching (also known as "live patching") for Linux. With Ksplice, updates and errata (CVEs, etc.) can be applied to running systems without restarting applications or rebooting..."

"In its quest for a bigger piece of the cloud market, Oracle's new IaaS services put the company in more direct competition with Amazon Web Services and other public cloud providers.

Oracle's cloud offerings include storage, elastic compute, and container services. The idea is to lure AWS users over to the Oracle camp, or, more important, to keep Oracle database users from defecting to other public cloud providers that offer much cheaper database services..."

"As a long-time advocate of cloud computing, the public cloud in particular, I'm excited by the conversations on hybrid cloud taking place right now. However, there is a dark side to hybrid cloud models that is only just now starting to be discussed. Mixing private and public cloud may send the message that IT now approves of placing infrastructure elements and data out of their immediate sphere of control. Just a few years ago, this type of action would have been shunned as risky and inefficient. In fact, public cloud has lowered the barrier to technology adoption to zero..."

"Lately I have seen a number of new CISOs let go after one year on the job. I became intrigued as to why we are seeing such a high failure rate for new CISOs.

I started talking to other CISOs and recruiters that specialize with cybersecurity recruiting and we started to see a pattern. The CISOs were heavy with technology experience, did not align themselves with the business, were not prepared for the C-Suite, and were being recruited by other companies for better opportunity..."

"The customer experience, also known as CX, is nothing new. But Forrester Research says 2016 will be the year that companies need to either embrace CX and make it central to all operations or get left behind. Here's what IT leaders need to do to survive.

Can your company's customers find what they are looking for instantly? Have you digitized your business to enable that level of immediate gratification? According to Forrester Research, 2016 will be "a year of consequence" for companies and their customer-experience strategies..."

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.' - John Vansant Wanamaker (July 11, 1838 - December 12, 1922)

"What Mr. Wanamaker was saying was, in effect, that he might as well flip a coin. His odds were rather different from those revealed in a recent study by the Genpact Research Institute. The study determined in IT, you'll need a very different coin because your chances of coming up 'heads' is just 30%. Yep, the study found that almost 70% of everything spent on IT doesn't meet the functional goals of projects or deliver the expected return on investment..."

"Despite advances over the past five years, IT vendor risk management is still done haphazardly and relies on static paper-based audits.

One of the fundamental best practices of cyber supply chain security is IT vendor risk management. When organizations purchase and deploy application software, routers, servers, and storage devices, they are in essence placing their trust in the IT vendors that develop and sell these products..."

"Harvey Koeppel recounts his quest to deliver great user experience without inviting undue data risks. The journey was not easy...

Creating a compelling user experience is the holy grail of mobile (and even desktop) app development, but there are plenty of factors that get in the way. Managing and designing apps that appropriately handle data risks, multiple device/operating system constraints, environmental considerations, legacy system constraints, and the granddaddy of them all -- enterprise risk appetite -- are all reasons why the grail remains holy and often not achieved..."

"As new technologies infiltrate a company's four walls and transfer greater control to mainstream business users, the question remains, just how relevant is IT? Writer Nicholas Carr asked that question more than a decade ago. Yet, in the wake of technologies like cloud computing, mobile devices and social media, IT's role continues to be an important issue..."

"Moving faster with IT isn't an all or nothing, legacy or replacement equation. There are many different paths. At Covanta, we have a set of systems and technologies that are in place, and we can call that legacy. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's whole. There will always be the priority of business alignment and driving business and business value, but the reality is that the basics have to run as flawlessly as possible..."

"We've been telling you that you need to transition from strictly managing an IT Agenda to owning a BT Agenda, too. 2016 is the year that needs to happen: your CEO will be looking for you to drive digital in your company - and increasingly digital is becoming your business.

At the center of your digital strategy is today's empowered customer who expects you to be able to serve her in her moment of need..."

Join us for the next vBeers @ Broward. We meet on the second Wednesday of each month. Come out and connect with other professionals in your industry! vBeers is a great event meant to promote growth of the IT industry here in South Florida.

Register today so you can be a part of this great monthly event! Please invite your friends and co workers who work in the IT industry!

Come out and connect with other professionals in your industry! vBeers is a great event meant to promote growth of the IT industry here in South Florida. Register today so you can be a part of this great monthly event! Feel free to invite all of your friends and co workers who work in the IT industry! This event will be sponsored by chewy.com (and possible some others.)

"If I could say just three words to prepare someone for disaster it would be these: Disasters change things. All of the reasons for not being prepared, and for not following emergency instructions in a disaster (too hard, too expensive, no need), are tied to those words.

If you don't believe disasters change things, you assume that you can handle whatever happens, and any investment into handling that better is unnecessary..."

"According to a Gartner report, the Disaster Recovery as a Service market originally emerged to address IT organizations' need to support increasingly aggressive recovery-time targets and more frequent and lower-cost testing while understaffed, or without requiring a significant time commitment by existing IT staff.

With its well-known Magic Quadrant, Gartner took a look at the DRaaS market and pulled out each vendors pros and cons..."

"When planning for disaster recovery, our natural inclination is to focus on the technical design. We work to strike the perfect balance between controlling infrastructure spend and the required capacity.

Technical considerations are of course paramount - replication schedules based on delta changes and available bandwidth, the impact of synchronous versus asynchronous writes, calculations of recovery time and recovery point objectives - all to ensure that the required data and systems are available at the secondary site..."

Mike writes, "Oracle Academy is offering an exciting opportunity to learn about the design principals behind the revolutionary Software in Silicon technology which is at the core of Oracle's SPARC M7 microprocessor chip design. In this LIVE panel discussion with senior executives from the software and hardware side of Oracle's systems business, you will gain insights into the strategy and thinking behind Oracle's dramatic re-design of computer chip architecture, as well as be able to ask questions to be addressed live by the panel members..."

"Data security is important in every industry. Every organization deals with internal data or customer data which, if breached, can cause major issues, as we know and continue to see. This is why it is important to examine as many processes that may be overlooked when it comes to security and security protocols. Thus, the following are some tips to keep your organization's network and data safe that many enterprises often overlook or do not ever consider in their security assessments:..."

IPv6 and the Internet of Things have arrived -- and with them an enormous potential expansion for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The number of connected devices is growing exponentially, with one billion new IoT devices expected to ship this year alone. As such, IPv4 addresses have been exhausted, but IPv6 is on deck to address this concern. The new system allows for 2^128 IP addresses (in comparison, IPv4 only carried 2^32 possible IP addresses). So everything is fine, right?

"Of the three ways carriers might boost the capacity of the mobile networks we increasingly rely on, the one they will try in Geneva next month is probably the hardest.

Adding extra cells to their networks in order to reuse the same radio frequencies in more places just involves some extra base station hardware -- and permission from a lot of farmers and building owners to erect new antennas..."

"WAN is the workhorse of your networking "wardrobe," if you will. It's an essential piece of technology that keeps your users happily connected and productive and your enterprise systems going strong. But that doesn't mean WAN is boring; in fact, the new WAN technology is snazzier than ever.

This timeless guide will explain all you need to know to be up to date on WAN basics. But we also cover new developments: optimization, outsourced management, how the cloud affects the WAN -- it's all here. This guide even has info for those curious about the latest in WAN architecture: the software-defined WAN (SD-WAN).

Read on to get informed on the wide area network of today and the fast-coming future WAN..."

"Technology may be fast-moving but some concepts have remained stable for decades. Not least the principle of resource constraints. Simply put, we have four finite variables to play with in our technological sandpit:

electrical power

processor speed

network bandwidth

storage volume

This principle is key to understanding the current Internet of Things phenomenon..."

"Autumn DePoe-Hughes captured on video a rather bizarre scene at Manchester Fort Shopping Park this past summer. If car doors were locked, they could not be unlocked. The reverse was true as well. And, annoying car alarms defied any attempt to silence them. DePoe-Hughes told John Leyden of The Register, "Someone else had complete control over our cars for well over half an hour."

"When consolidating data centers after a corporate merger, scrutinize custom software applications and security. You may improve IT operations.

There are two major elements to consider when consolidating data centers after an acquisition: integrating hardware/software portfolios and processes, if desired, consolidating physical IT resources into fewer data centers..."

"Most businesses are still wrestling with beefing up their existing endpoint security tools--typically a mix of antivirus, host intrusion prevention system (HIPS), host firewall, whitelisting, and heuristics, for example--to better defend against attacks that are morphing so fast that it's impossible to catch everything and targeted malware or attacks that bypass security measures. Bottom line: the human behind the endpoint keyboard is impossible to shield from harm when all it takes is a click to be attacked..."

"We're not using Windows 95 anymore. Few Pentium I systems remain in production use, and the majority of the world no longer connects to the Internet through telephone lines and analog modems (though some poor souls still do).

If those days are over, then why do the horrible software design and security practices that stem from that era still roam the Internet -- and in new code?..."

"CISOs are pulling up roots and moving to new companies at a rapid pace as demand grows for leaders with cyber and information security expertise and salaries skyrocket. Many veteran infosec professionals are also joining the CISO ranks for the first time as companies add the position to their C-suites..."

"In the future, the role of humans will focus on the architecture, design and automation of security, not in the actual testing or operational management.

The world around us is changing at such a break-neck pace that it's often hard to understand the macro implications. For the information security professional, this dynamic has the potential to broadside your career track -- or worse, the effectiveness of your job. Here are two issues companies are trying to address:.."

"WA's office of the Auditor General was able to break into two sensitive state government networks by successfully guessing on the first attempt that the passwords for the admin account were 'password'.

One of the networks contained thousands of highly confidential and sensitive records including information on minors, which the audit team says should only have ever been accessible by a small number of agency staff..."

"We explored multiple surveys and studies about bad bosses to assemble this rogue's gallery of the most reviled types of managers. Check out our 10 scariest bosses (complete with their own Halloween costumes), and consider our advice for how to deal with them...."

"As computers grow ever more powerful, we humans have to figure out where we still remain superior. Here's one suggestion: although the Internet is full of endless reams of data, it takes a human mind to suss through it all and determine what qualifies as interesting to other humans. Thus, we at ITworld present you with the following anecdotes about technology and the Internet, guaranteed to have been selected by the human hand and eye to pique your interest. Hopefully robots won't take this job for another few years..."

"The nature of work is always changing and in the 21st century, few people need to be active while they work -- which has extreme health consequences. Luckily there are several alternatives to slouching over a desk for more than eight hours a day. The latest ergonomic offering making news is Altwork's reclining workstation..."

"Integrated backup appliances and disk backup systems are playing key roles in the evolution of data protection to drive business efficiency.

Data protection and specifically backup is one of the most important components of a comprehensive data management strategy. Traditionally, backup has been seen as an onerous job. However, the introduction and evolution of integrated backup appliances has eased that pain for many organizations..."

"Several months ago, I was slated to meet members of a client's Business Intelligence team for happy hour. I decided to get there early, so imagine my surprise when I walked into the room 15 minutes early - and everyone was already seated and participating in a lively discussion! I took my seat, and the senior director asks, 'What does data governance mean to you?' My candid answer ..."

"One of the key findings in our latest benchmark research into predictive analytics is that companies are incorporating predictive analytics into their operational systems more often than was the case three years ago. The research found that companies are less inclined to purchase stand-alone predictive analytics tools (29% vs 44% three years ago) and more inclined to purchase predictive analytics built into business intelligence systems (23% vs 20%), applications (12% vs 8%), databases (9% vs 7%) and middleware (9% vs 2%)..."

"Organizations for the most part agree on the great value of corporate data. Unfortunately, for the most part data professionals believe their organizations do a poor job of interpreting and using that data.

A new study from Dimensional Research reveals this disconnect, and concludes that 'data professionals have little confidence in the way business stakeholders within their organizations use corporate data when making important business decisions.'

"The Greek classic, The Odyssey, tells of a hero, Odysseus, who spent 10 years trying to return to Greece after fighting in the Trojan War.

At one point Odysseus was lured to and almost dashed upon the rocks of an island inhabited by creatures called the Sirens. The Sirens were Muses of the lower world, who sang a hauntingly beautiful song that called to all sailors who approached their island. Sailors who fell victim to the Siren's song followed the song to their death upon the rocks of Anthemusa, the Siren's island..."

"This is the time of year that we expect to receive lots of predictions and forecasts for the New Year, but one of the most dramatic came in yesterday from Ashish Thusoo, CEO and co-founder of Qubole. Thusoo is a big data veteran known for his work on the Apache Hive project and also known as one of the creators of Facebook's data infrastructure..."

"The amount of data being collected about people, companies, and governments is unprecedented. What can be done with that data is downright frightening. From bedrooms to boardrooms, from Wall Street to Main Street, the ground is shifting in ways that only the most cyber-savvy can anticipate. We reveal the creepy ways to use data now and in the near future..."

"Where should Big Data be stored and shared in a cost-effective manner? How can it be most efficiently transferred across advanced data networks? How will researchers be interacting with the data and global computing infrastructure? A team of trail-blazing scientists and information technologists is working hard to answer these questions by studying ways to simplify collaboration and improve efficiency..."

"The R Consortium, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and open source foundation to support the R user community, announced it is awarding its first grant to advance the infrastructure supporting the R programming language. Led by the R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC), the grant program provides financial support to projects that will address critical needs of the R user community..."

"Our friends over at Simplilearn put together a compelling infographic below that highlights 10 industry verticals and how they're applying the big data technology stack. Simplilearn is a leading provider of a suite of professional certification courses..."

"Most forms of communication used by enterprises these days are highly prone to being intercepted, whether by law enforcement, cyberthieves, corporate spies, or wayward employees and contractors. That leaves enterprise IT open to new approaches to safeguard communications. I just saw one creative idea on the Lifehacker website suggesting that outdated mobile devices could be used as top-secret, Wi-Fi-based privacy devices..."

"For the past several decades, much of the computer revolution has aimed to link every machine to every other machine in one big harmonic convergence called the Internet. That trend is coming to an end -- at least in the emerging world of what are being called beacons. Instead of trying to reach everyone in the galaxy, beacon builders want to reach only the right people who are within a few meters of their transmitting devices..."

"Companies are wary about what employees are doing on their smartphones. Be it data loss or time-wasting, a growing number of employers are actively stopping staff from using certain apps on company-controlled devices.

After surveying the 6,000 of the companies that uses its mobile security management software, MobileIron determined the top 10 consumer apps that are most often blocked or blacklisted at companies:..."

"The smartphone has emerged as the true "all-in-one" device. Stop for a minute and think about the sheer number of stand-alone devices and services the (not so) humble smartphone has killed off or shrunk down over the past decade. I started tallying up the obvious ones and the list grows quickly..."

"The growth of employee-owned devices in the workplace is placing new demands on enterprises struggling to protect both personal and professional data.

Historically, corporate-owned desktops and laptops were obligatory. They not only saved employees time and money, but also enabled IT to carefully control their use and minimize risks associated with using them for work. Anti-malware, data loss prevention (DLP), web access control and VPN were some of the security capabilities that were commonly enabled to company-issued devices..."

"Governments all around the world are trying to decimate encryption. These efforts have been revealed in most countries through plans to crack cryptography within smartphones and other devices throughout many regimes. With the Queen's Speech in May revealing more on the U.K.'s infamous communications data bill, we now know that 'Snooper's Charter' plans to ban a bunch of social messaging apps. In the U.S., the Obama administration has been approaching tech companies and applying pressure so they can gain access to encrypted communications. George Orwell's 1984 is seemingly coming to life, as Big Brother wants inclusion to your emails, web browsers and mobile phone messages..."

"Last January, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, UK Prime Minister David Cameron began advocating for limiting or preventing ordinary citizens from using end-to-end encryption that the government could not break. Now, the government has introduced legislation that would ban companies like Apple from offering end-to-end encryption. What makes this particularly ironic is the discovery of other documents from earlier this year that show the UK encouraging enterprise and governments to adopt encryption..."

In addition to encrypting communications, journalists will often need to encrypt documents they are working on, such as articles in progress or documents passed to them in confidence. Commonly used compression tools often provide encryption support; though commercial tools are potentially compromised and should not be trusted..."

"Old models of computing always tend to linger too long, but client-server was based on a fallacy -- and needs to go away sooner rather than later

I write this week from IBM's Insight conference in Las Vegas. A former InfoWorld editor in chief, Stewart Alsop, predicted that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1996. This week I'll attend a session where IBM runs Apache Spark on a mainframe, even as the mighty beast's luster finally fades..."

Katarina writes, "There were many great sessions and announcements at Oracle OpenWorld 2015, but for me the most exciting was the announcement of Oracle Javascript Extension Toolkit (JET). Oracle JET is our new development framework, targeted at intermediate to advanced JavaScript developers working on client-side applications. It's a collection of open source JavaScript libraries along with a set of Oracle contributed JavaScript libraries that make it as simple and efficient as possible to build applications that consume and interact with Oracle products and services, especially Oracle Cloud Services.

JET was formally announced by our VP Chris Tonas in his general session: Revolutionizing Application Development with Oracle Cloud on Tuesday, October 27th...."

The profiler now uses a single window which contains controls to configure and control the profiling session and display the collected results. The session is configured by selecting a profiling mode using the Profile dropdown menu and started by clicking the Profile button without providing any special settings. If needed, the settings can be tweaked using the Settings pane displayed on demand above the profiling results..."

Geertjan writes, "Good news - until the end of November 2015, a 30% discount is available for the e-book version of 'Beginning NetBeans IDE for Java Developers'..."

"Beginning NetBeans IDE" is your authoritative guide for getting started learning and using the free and open source NetBeans IDE. Written by Geertjan Wielenga, who has worked on the NetBeans Team since 2004, it shows you what the IDE is all about and how to use it with real-world case studies built from the ground up as you learn all about the IDE...

Nexenta, the global leader in Open Source-Driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS) solutions, announced that it is a gold sponsor of VMware vForum Tokyo. Held at The Prince Park Tower, Tokyo (November 10-11), the conference will bring together industry thought-leaders, experts and professionals to explore the latest innovation in virtualization and cloud technology.

At the event, Nexenta will display its full portfolio of solutions - demonstrating how the agile, flexible and hardware agnostic storage architectures empower today's companies to drive the most value from their cloud deployments. Capable of handling large information stores at ease, critical data can be transformed into valuable business intelligence with OpensSDS. On display, event attendees will find NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN, NexentaEdge and, its award winning, flagship solution NexentaStor 4.1.

Hannah Breeze writes in Channelnomics, "Veritas kicked off its EMEA partner conference with a groveling apology after admitting its split from Symantec is causing "pain" and "frustration" in its channel.

Veritas and Symantec will formally split in January when the former gets taken over by private equity firm Carlyle, but they split operationally three weeks ago. A number of technical hitches happened during this process and only some of them have been resolved..."

Cisco announced it is advancing its Security Everywhere strategy deeper into the cloud, network, and endpoints with new security products and features, and a threat awareness service as organizations execute on their digital transformation.

Companies are banking on digital initiatives to provide new avenues of financial growth and reduce operational complexity. As data becomes more pervasive, so do attacks by threat actors which often leave companies scrambling to secure their assets...

Fifty girls from the city of Cancun have been selected to receive scholarships from Cisco Networking Academy as parts of Cisco's efforts to encourage engagement with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by young women and to promote opportunities for women in this important and rapidly developing field.

"Michael Dell reveals his plans for the future of the soon-to-be-merged Dell/EMC -- touching on what will happen to overlapping products and services and how the company will serve the growing cloud market.

Following its $67bn acquisition of EMC, Dell says it will soon be the largest "privately-controlled, integrated technology company" in the world -- so just what will it do with this newfound status?..."

Matt Brown writes in CRN, "When it comes to the networking market, Dell is counting on its partners and a growing demand for converged infrastructure to give it a foothold in a space long dominated by industry giant Cisco Systems..."

"We've got a really good product offering, but more and more the discussion isn't just a networking discussion, it's a converged infrastructure conversation," Frank Vitagliano, Dell vice president of North American channels, told CRN.

Microsoft Corp. announced that Microsoft Software & Systems Academy (MSSA), which provides IT career training to eligible active-duty U.S. service members, is expanding from three locations to nine and will be servicing 12 military installations.

Launched in November 2013 at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, MSSA helps active duty U.S. service members develop the career skills necessary to meet the IT industry's high demand for cloud developers, cloud administrators, and database and business intelligence administrators. Upon successful completion of the program, participants gain an interview for a full-time job at Microsoft or one of its hiring partners.

Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. announced a partnership that will help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. As a key component of today's announcement, Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. In addition, Microsoft and Red Hat are also working together to address common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds...

Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) reported the results of its second quarter of fiscal year 2016, ended October 2, 2015.

Michael A. Brown, president and CEO, said, 'With a security-focused Symantec, we continue to increase our momentum as the global leader in cybersecurity. We drove growth in Enterprise Security for the second consecutive quarter, partly due to a 10 percent revenue increase in Information Protection solutions including another record quarter for DLP. To set the stage for continued progress, we will deliver more than a dozen new products and services over the next three quarters.'

IBM announced new innovations to its IBM Spectrum Storage family of software-defined storage to help clients improve storage management, data security and reduce data costs as they deploy new technology to support cognitive and other data-driven applications across hybrid cloud environments.

IBM Spectrum Storage is designed to help clients securely embrace the explosive growth of data and support both traditional and next generation applications. New features to improve security and cost-effective management of large amounts of data and storage...

IBM announced that it has acquired Gravitant, Inc., a privately held company that develops cloud-based software to enable organizations to easily plan, buy and manage, or 'broker,' software and computing services from multiple suppliers across hybrid clouds. With such capabilities, mixed environments of private and public clouds can begin to be integrated and digitally managed as one for greater performance and efficiency...

IBM announced API Harmony with intelligent cloud-based API matchmaking technology for developers as part of a series of technology, product and services announcements to advance the growing API Economy. API Harmony provides a unique developer experience, now using cognitive technologies like intelligent mapping and graph technology to anticipate what a developer will require to build new apps, make recommendations on which APIs to use, show API relationships, and identify what is missing.

Fujitsu announced its most comprehensive workstation portfolio. With the introduction of two new models - CELSIUS W and CELSIUS J - to the workstation line-up, Fujitsu is addressing customer demands for smaller, yet more powerful workstations and a minimum lifecycle of 36 months, while at the same time achieving maximum performance scores and low noise emissions.

Fujitsu is widening access to quick and painless implementation of validated virtualized server and desktop infrastructures, with the popular FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMEFLEX vShape1. New extensions to the well-established PRIMEFLEX vShape reference architecture include VMware vSphere 6.0 virtualization software, and a new backup concept based on the FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS CS200c S2 Integrated Backup Appliance...

Fujitsu, the market leader in document imaging scanners, introduced ScanSnap Sync, making it easier than ever for ScanSnap scanner customers to access and manage their scanned documents across multiple devices. When scanning to an iOS or Android mobile device with the 'ScanSnap Connect' app or launching ScanSnap Organizer on a PC or Mac, documents are automatically synchronized with supported cloud services, utilizing the ScanSnap Sync application. Customers can then make edits to the documents and those changes are synchronized back to the mobile device when stored in the preconfigured ScanSnap Sync folder.

VMware is following a consistent theme for handling customer desire to implement DevOps for application development, while providing a steady foundation for traditional applications. VMware, like Microsoft, is burdened with how do organizations practically implement bi-modal IT.

"It has been an eventful few weeks for VMware (NYSE:VMW) investors. The cloud-services provider's parent company, EMC (NYSE:EMC), announced this month that it will join with computer company Dell to create a mega IT giant.

VMware will not be taken private as part of this transaction. Yet the deal has major implications for its business.

CEO Patrick Gelsinger recently held a conference call with investors to discuss the linkup with Dell, along with VMware's latest operating trends. Here are five key points that management made in that chat..."

"The Friday Five is a weekly Red Hat blog post with 5 of the week's top news items and ideas from or about Red Hat and the technology industry. Consider it your weekly digest of things that caught our eye.

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc., sponsored and community-driven open source collaboration, announced the general availability of Fedora 23, marking a noteworthy first year of Fedora releases driven by the Fedora.next initiative. Under Fedora.next, which serves as the umbrella planning phase for the Fedora Project's next decade, the Fedora operating system split into three distinct editions with each release: Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server and Fedora Cloud, each serving a different role for end users...

Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. announced a partnership that will help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. As a key component of today's announcement, Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. In addition, Microsoft and Red Hat are also working together to address common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.

Andrew Edison, senior vice president of sales, EMEA region at Level 3 Communications is sharing insights at the Gartner Symposium ITXPO in Barcelona. His presentation, entitled 'Many clouds, one platform: Realising the vision of cloud-based transformation,' will explore how digital transformation can be achieved only by leveraging a network that offers the speed and capacity to carry all the required content and data.

Autumn is here. The air is crisp. As our thoughts turn to the next big event - Thanksgiving - retailers are bracing for the start of the season that can make or break their fiscal years. Being prepared to meet the demand for holiday sales requires exceptional forecasting and inventory management, in addition to risk identification and mitigation. More importantly, online shopping is becoming the method of choice for holiday shoppers. Here are some questions retailers should ask themselves if they want to avoid an IT catastrophe this holiday shopping season...

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, announced new RSA Archer GRC offerings, enhancing the user experience for all RSA Archer solutions. New features are engineered to include a walk-up friendly, task-driven user interface and drag-and-drop advanced workflow capabilities to make risk management easy and effective for all 'three lines of defense' - business users, risk managers, and the audit team. Additionally, new features have been added to RSA Archer Operational Risk Management to help streamline how organizations identify, assess, respond, and monitor existing and emerging risks.

HP celebrated its global launch as a new, publicly listed Fortune 100 corporation. A global leader in printing and personal systems, the company is focused on creating technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere.

Backed by nearly 50,000 employees and drawing from a 76-year legacy of engineered innovation, the reinvented HP Inc. aims to create a world where technology works around the needs of society and adapts to every business and person, to their context and environment, helping them move from ideation to creation effortlessly and naturally...

"In the PC and mobile world, with new processor launches come refreshed product lines. HP Inc's latest commercial offerings are no different as they've introduced the latest and greatest technologies into their new commercial laptops, SFF (small form factor) PCs and room computing solutions, including their AIOs (All-in-one)..."

"Leading IT, consulting and deployment services provider Fastrack Technology has improved the management of its network traffic by deploying the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM). Fastrack Technology is the latest customer in Australia to roll out the solution and use it to improve the scalability and performance of its managed services, plus extend the offering to its own clients as a virtual service offering.

Fastrack Technology needed additional flexibility to match the dynamic demands of its fast-growing software-as-a-service business. A new breed of Application Delivery Controller (ADC) that is purely software-based - running on the same hypervisors that support the company's cloud-based operation - Brocade vTM enables Fastrack Technology to modernize its application delivery strategy, with the ability to spin up new capacity on demand..."

Brocade announced that it has joined the Intel Security Innovation Alliance program. Under the program, Brocade intends to integrate Intel Security products and technologies with Brocade solutions, enabling enterprises to deploy more secure New IP networking solutions that leverage Intel's industry-leading security technologies.

As part of the Intel Security Innovation Alliance program, the Brocade SDN Controller, Brocade Network Advisor, and Brocade analytics and security applications will gain additional layers of security as they are integrated with Intel Security's Data Exchange Layer, Enterprise Security Manager, and ePolicy Orchestrator...

Comcast Business announced a substantial network expansion to the Redmond-Woodinville business district in Washington, bringing a full range of Ethernet services to nearly 100 businesses in the 150th - 170th block of Woodinville/Redmond Road.

Comcast Business invested more than $100,000 to bring fiber and coaxial cable to area businesses that range from construction and manufacturing firms to fitness centers and wineries ...

"Aloke Guha is the Vice President, Analytics and Big Data at Hitachi Data Systems and a passionate IT executive and serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience working in public companies and startups. He has 26 issued patents and over 30 pending, is an avid traveler speaking at over 60 conferences and sings in Boulder's cool choir.

icrunchdata News speaks with technology leaders in the analytics space to learn about what they are currently focused on, explore their career path and dig into what their interests are outside of technology..."

Windstream has completed significant service upgrades in approximately 600 markets across 12 states to bring faster Internet speeds of up to 100 megabits-per-second (Mbps) to residential and small business customers.
The upgrades come on the heels of Windstream's September announcement of faster speed availability in 250 initial markets. Combined, nearly one million households and small businesses now have access to premium speeds up to 100 Mbps in Windstream communities.

F5 Networks, Inc. announced revenue of $501.3 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015, up 4 percent from $483.6 million in the prior quarter and 8 percent from $465.3 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014. For fiscal year 2015, revenue was $1.92 billion, up 11 percent from $1.73 billion last year...

NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP), the founder of the OpenStack Manila open-source file-share-as-a-service project, announced that Manila is production ready for the mainstream enterprise. With Manila, enterprises can now easily build or enhance a cloud-ready data center capable of handling business-critical and content-management applications. Customers can also support storage and test environments while enabling big data scale and performance as data moves freely between clouds...